The BiFab Project

Sarens recently performed the transport and lift of an offshore
wind farm jacket cluster for client Burntisland Fabrications
(BiFab) in Methil, Scotland.

BiFab is manufacturing 26 jacket substructures for the
Beatrice Offshore Wind Farm in the North Sea, located off the coast
of Scotland. As part of its GBP 100 million contract with EPCI
contractor Seaway Heavy Lifting, BiFab will deliver the first ten
substructures this August and the remainder in April of
2018.

Working in unpredictable weather and changing visibility,
the Sarens team came together to move and lift the first cluster,
which weighed over 1.000 tonnes.

The following equipment was used for the
operation:

Demag CC9800

Demag CC8800-1 BB

2 x Demag CC2800-1

2 x LR1160

1 x LTR1200

2 x LTR1100

Various Telescopic / Lattice Boom Cranes

60 axles of SMPTs and 6 PPUs

Sarens cranes had been on site since May of 2017. The
CC9800 and CC8800-1 were delivered to the site by vessel,
offloaded, and rigged on the quayside in their final working
positions.

For this operation, the team first transported the
1.022-tonne load 76 metres, an operation that took four SPMT
operators about two hours to complete.

With the offshore jacket in the horizontal position at the
up-ending location, the Sarens team was ready for the 90-metre
lift. They attached the lifting tackle to the lifting points
and removed the lashing so that two main lift cranes, the CC9800
and CC8800-1, could begin hoisting the load up in slow increments,
slewing slightly.

With the main lift cranes in operation, both tail cranes
then began to hoist, slew and track towards the main lift cranes.
As the offshore jacket became more vertical and the load
was transferred onto the main lift cranes, the tail
cranes began to slew the offshore jacket into its final position
until the load was shared between the main lift cranes.

"The greatest challenge during the lifting operation was
to coordinate the functioning of the two main lift cranes and two
tail cranes," says Operations Manager Andrew Hunt.

It took four crane operators and six banksmen an hour and
a half to up-end the jacket from a horizontal to a vertical
position, including twenty minutes for the client to fix brackets
to the jacket.

"Coordination and communication played a vital part to
ensure the lifting of the offshore jacket was completed safely,"
says Hunt.

With the lift complete, the unpredictable weather took
over for the finale: within fifteen minutes of upending, fog
enveloped the top of the offshore jacket and it was no longer
visible from the ground.